JJ seriously if you are going to try and show him how to slipstream his hard drives, remember he might do more harm than good. That's why Im giving him the advice to do it the good old fashion way vs shortcuts.

You are waaaaaaaaay off the mark. As to shortcuts, I don't take them. Though that is the default on this board. If they can find a one click solution, they will take it above all else. I do the job properly the first time.

Lubuntu...or Zorin.

Inflammatory posts as well as insulting posts and replies have been removed. You have every right to express your opinion about the topic. You may disagree, but it must be done in a civil manner.

Yeah, you may get the hd to boot, etc, but whenever something goes sideways you'll have to wonder if it's your weird installation. Do a fresh install of Win 7 and go in peace.

If the MS Office is on a CD there is no way for it to know how often it has been run -- it's read only!

These days, a lot of people copy the OS install disk to a USB drive and install from there. Saves time and grief.

Yeah, you may get the hd to boot, etc, but whenever something goes sideways you'll have to wonder if it's your weird installation. Do a fresh install of Win 7 and go in peace.

If the MS Office is on a CD there is no way for it to know how often it has been run -- it's read only!

These days, a lot of people copy the OS install disk to a USB drive and install from there. Saves time and grief.

Thanks, I'm going to do just that or something similar. For the moment though, this Vista HD keeps working so I'll ride it until it croaks, and then go from there.

Far as my MS Office disc goes, installing wasn't the problem the last time I tried a number of years ago. When I entered the product key to activate it online though, got a message saying that I had reach the max number of uses/activations. Have never tried to reinstall on a drive it existed on before, but I'll give it a go when the time comes.

Thanks again for your comment.

The ailing HD in my Dell XPS420 (Vista OS) became very unreliable and then wouldn't boot up at all evening of 09JAN.

I gave that WIN7 HD another try, no dice, so with nothing to lose, I tried its "Restore Factory Settings". It went through the process and WIN7 booted up after restart; which for me was not a foregone conclusion, so I was pleasantly surprised when that happened.

Pib and others were right, it was pretty ugly, and took me a while in Device Manager to get things working and of course, the avalanche of Windows Updates. As several here opined, \System said my Windows OS Product Key didn't match the hardware - it was showing the former Vista Product Key. Located the MSoft COA sticker on the HP computer frame the WIN7 HD came from, entered that Key, verified genuine, good to go.

All seems to be stable now, nice to have this computer on Win7 instead of Vista. Thanks again for the comments and suggestions.